Awesci – Science Everyday

By Anupum Pant

While animals are often tranquillized using tranquillizing darts, there’s no such reliable instrument for humans because of two main reasons:

1. The amount of dose has to be varied after the weight of the creature to be sedated is estimated. If the dose is far too less, there isn’t proper effect and if it is too much the animal would die. There’s no way of estimating the weight and changing the dose quickly enough to deal with humans of various sizes.

2. The tranquillizer has to go through the blood stream for it to take effect. So, it usually takes a couple of seconds to sedate an animal. So, if a dangerous human advances towards a police or military personnel with a dangerous weapon, these several seconds might prove to be dangerous.

Thus military and police use the electroshock weapons like TASERs to deal with dangerous humans. While tranquillisers are fine to sedate animals.

By Anupum Pant

There’s a game on Android and iOS called Blendoku. In it, you are given a bunch of colours and are expected to arrange them into a gradient. Most levels are doable. But at times you get stuck and only trial and error seems to get you ahead. That’s because sometimes when the colours given to you to arrange into a smooth gradient are so close to each other, it becomes very tough for you to distinguish between them.

However, some women don’t seem to have that problem with arranging colours like this. These woman, due to a special gene found only in women, are blessed with something called tetrachromacy – a kind of a super vision.

Normally, humans have 3 kinds of cones, each of which is sensitive to red, blue and green. Some women, have a fourth kind of cone, supposedly a yellow one and are able to see 100 times as many colours as we see. To them, two colours which seem completely indistinguishable to you are clearly different. They can’t explain what they see. Just like you can’t explain the colour red to a blind person. The only way to determine that they do have a super ability is to check their genetic make up.

By Anupum Pant

Anand Varma, a photographer recently started keeping bees in his backyard. That was because National geographic had asked him to shoot a bee related video. He teamed up with a bee lab from UC davis and learned how to actually raise bees.

After a couple of months living with the bees, and understanding the problems (pesticides, diseases and habitat loss, and a blood sucking parasite) they’ve been facing lately, Anand Varma came out with this amazing timelapse video of life of a bee, right from the day it is only an egg.

By Anupum Pant

If you ever spot a bird stealing stuff from your picnic basket, especially things made up of bright plastic, which isn’t even food, don’t be surprised. There’s a great chance it might be a male bowerbird.

The male bowerbird, to woo the females has to amass blue coloured things. So, remember that all the blue stuff you take to the picnic might not come back.

By Anupum Pant

A tadpole’s life is tough. In the initial few days, before it can move around with ease, it is susceptible to becoming the dinner of several other creatures. But the darwin’s frog, a frog wich looks like a leaf, grows to be about 2-4 cm at most, has a trick up its sleeve to avoid this.

After the female has laid eggs and the ones that have hatched, the male frog of this species gobbles up its kids and keeps them in its vocal sac to raise them. The tadpoles grow inside the male’s vocal sac and when they are ready to face the outside world, the father spits out his sons.

By Anupum Pant

I consider the phrase “organic foods” mostly a farce and there’s a reason behind it. Since agriculture began, farmers have, for generations after generations, picked the most desirable traits, like the best colour, size, taste etc. Today, the average vegetable or fruit you see in the market is easily labelled organic, as long as it has been grown with certain conditions met.

In reality the average fruit or vegetable has gone a drastic change in its genes and has transformed in appearance since back then. So much that you wouldn’t even recognize the old real varieties of fruits if they were placed in front of you. In fact, broccoli didn’t even exist back then. But that is probably fine, because the kind of genetic selection was mostly a slow and natural process with a tiny bit of human intervention when it comes to selecting the best traits. Just like the muscular Belgian cows which aren’t exactly GMOs.

For fun, let’s look at this infographic which shows what a watermelon looked like and what it looks like now, after extensive selection breeding.

See that tiny watermelon? Today the heaviest one ever grown was more than 121 kilograms. More of these infographics can be found at [Vox]

Okay, like I said, that is mostly natural. But there are not so natural ways that have been figured out to speed  up the selection process.

Mutations or physical variations in cultivation is where it started. But it was a very slow process. Picking the best traits generation after generation.

A much faster process of making several kinds of variations emerged in the year 1940. This time, plant breeders approached the tedious problem  of selection with a fairly new tool called atomic radiation.

Scientists soon found that when plants were exposed to radiation, it would damage (or simply scramble) the DNA and would cause a random mutation every time. This approach helped them generate a vast number of random, good and bad mutations at a much higher rate than the natural way. And larger number of variants meant, larger probability of finding the most desirable state very fast. We no longer had to wait for generations.

Thousands of variants produced by this kind of mutation breeding, either by radiation like gamma rays, thermal neutrons, X-rays or by exposure to certain chemicals have been recorded in the government’s database at – IAEA.

One great example of this is the ruby red grapefruit. As wikipedia tells us…

Using radiation to trigger mutations, new varieties were developed to retain the red tones which typically faded to pink. The Rio Red variety is the current (2007) Texas grapefruit with registered trademarks Rio Star and Ruby-Sweet, also sometimes promoted as “Reddest” and “Texas Choice”. The Rio Red is a mutation bred variety which was developed by treatment of bud sticks with thermal neutrons. Its improved attributes of mutant variety are fruit and juice colour, deeper red, and wide adaptation

And if you are one of those who don’t believe in wikipedia quotes, then here’s an extract from a book called Radiation and Modern Life: Fulfilling Marie Curie’s Dream By Alan E. Waltar…

 

Although I’m not suggesting that it is dangerous to eat these kind of fruits and vegetables, I’m making a point that the whole organic food industry is a farce designed to make your pockets lighter.

Crops produced through this kind of mutation breeding has been sold safely in every supermarket store today. No labels whatsoever are placed on them that mention these unnatural genetic alterations that were done to create the delicious fruit of the day. These are even be labelled organic when they are grown with organic food production requirements. They need not undergo any separate testing. But is clearly not very organic when you consider its genetic origin.

By Anupum Pant

Ninja slug is one of those 100 new species (since as 2007) that have been found in Sabah Borneo, an island in Malaysia. These are the longest insects (although not insects, they are more closely related to Octopi) among any new ones that have been found. They are only found in a fairly high altitude region of Borneo, from 1200 to 1900 meters. They live on tree leaves. And since they are slugs, they of course don’t carry around their own homes (read shells). Actually, no. More about the shells later.

In the map below marked with a red place marker, in the whole wide world, these ninja slugs are found just there. No where else.

They have long tail-like-things, about three times the size of their heads, behind their bodies which are usually wrapped around their bodies like a cat would normally do while sleeping. That is the reason they were almost given a scientific name with “Felis” in it. But the scientist who first discovered it wanted to name it after his girlfriend. and he called it “Ibycus Rachelae”.

These creatures fall into a category known as the semi-slugs. That means they sort of have a shell on them, but it isn’t a shell that’s enough for them to live in.

What is most interesting about them, the actual reason I even decided to write about these ninja slugs is their unusual breeding ritual. The males of these slugs are probably considered dangerous by their females. That’s because the males like to fire hard harpoons like darts made of CaCo3 towards their females during their mating process. Also commonly known as “love darts.” – as shown in the electron microscope image here. And that’s how we gave them the name, ninja slugs.

These harpoons penetrate the skin of the female and are said to create a hormone in the female which probably increases the chance of the  male impregnating the female.

Life’s certainly tough in the slug world.